Previews

Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach -- Twilight Forge

The next update to Dungeons & Dragons Online adds plenty of cool new stuff, but major fundamental changes still appear to be on the drawing board.

Spiffy:

Cool new monsters; new race; new social tools; loot and dungeon XP tables being reviewed; some solo content.

Iffy:

Changes to fundamental issues still on drawing board.

One of the greatest ironies about Dungeons & Dragons Online is that it may have hurt itself by being too true to its pencil-and-paper inspiration. Many of the game's most sterling qualities come when it reproduces the feeling of exploring a brand new dungeon with a small group of buddies. Unfortunately, for all the game's virtues as a reproduction of the original D&D, it seemed to fall short when providing what MMO players have come to expect from the genre -- solo content, PvP, crafting, and fostering a good environment for common social experiences.

The good thing about an MMO, however, is that it's not static. Good developers listen to their player base and change their game to better provide the experience their players desire. At this year's E3, I spent quite a bit of time listening to Producer James Jones talking about how Turbine is determined to be such a company.

The game's upcoming "Module 2," calledTwilight Forge, offers quite a bit more of what most agree the game already does quite well. It introduces the Drow as a playable character race which will, of course, immediately instigate a huge glut of Drow Rangers with some variation of the name "Drizzt." It also brings in a bunch of iconic D&D monsters for players to brutally murder in order to steal their stuff. They include the Ogre Mage, the Mummy, Mind Flayers, and the classic repository of an insane number of 9th level spells, the Lich. Finally, there's a new high-level end-game boss for 10th level players to test themselves against, a giant Warforged Titan.

The most interesting new features coming in Twilight Forge are the more subtle ones. According to Jones, the team is working hard to dramatically revamp their social tools, including a redesign on the looking-for-group system that resembles in-game want ads. There's also an in-game mail system in the works and a bit more solo content available in the low-level Harbor section of Stormreach. Jones believes this will help new players more easily transition into the group-required mind set that Dungeons & Dragons Online is built around. The team is also working on a new addition to the "Adventurer's Journal" that will act as a guide to all the quests in the game and act as a record of which ones have been completed. Completing certain dungeons will grant favor with one of the three Dragonmarked houses that rule Stormreach, and finishing enough dungeons will give the player awards and bonuses that can only be earned through family favor -- like extra bank slots.

When it comes to many of the game's fundamentals, though, there's good news and bad. The good news is that Turbine has started a comprehensive internal review of the game, assessing its weaknesses and formulating plans for improvements. Some of the features under development include more solo content for higher level players, a serious redistribution of loot and XP tables for many of the city's dungeons, more open wilderness areas, crafting, and, best of all, PvP.

The problem, of course, is that most of those changes are currently in the theoretical brainstorming stage. While the team has started working on PvP, Jones admits that it's going to take some serious bending and tweaking of the rules to get any sort of effective PvP system in place. The original pencil-and-paper games, of course, were heavily biased toward the PvE style, and there are many high-level player talents that, properly used, could kill another player in one shot. Twilight Forge is currently scheduled for release in July.